ILM's state-of-the-art (storage) studio: Industrial Light & Magic uses high-speed NAS servers with a distributed file system, 10GB/sec Ethernet, and a 5000-node renderfarm to store and move 170TB of content.(Storage in the Studio)(Lucas Digital Limited L.L.C. Industrial Light & Magic Div.)

When George Lucas moved a large part of his filmmaking empire from San Rafael, California--a small town north of San Francisco--into a state-of-the-art, four-building complex on 17 acres of parkland in San Francisco's Presidio, he spared no detail. Lawrence Halprin, the renowned landscape architect, even rearranged individual rocks in the babbling brook that rambles through the campus to achieve the most pleasing sound.

Similarly, the technical team left no stone unturned when it developed the infrastructure that powers Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Lucas' award-winning visual arts facility, and the Lucas Arts game-development division. "When we went from San Rafael to the Presidio, we had a 10X increase in network bandwidth," says systems developer Michael Thompson. "We knew it would be coming, so we designed a system that could handle a massive jump in network throughput."

At the new Lucas Digital Arts Center (LDAC) in the Presidio, a 10GB/sec Ethernet backbone feeds data into 1GB/sec pipes that run to the desktops. About 600 miles of fiber-optic cable thread through 865,000 sq. ft. of building space; the network is designed to accommodate 4K images via 300 10GB/sec and 1500 1GB/ sec Ethernet ports.

A 13,500-sq.-ft. data center houses the renderfarm, file servers, and storage systems; the data center's 3000-processor (AMD) renderfarm expands to 5000 processors after-hours by including desktop machines.

"All these render nodes constantly need data," says Thompson. "At ILM, and probably at most visual effects studios, there is an ongoing war between the renderfarm and storage. Currently, we have about half a dozen major motion-picture projects under way. Keeping everyone happy requires feeding a phenomenal amount of data to those render nodes."

How much data? "The whole [storage] system holds about 170TB, and we are 90 percent full," says Thompson.

In a visual effects-laden film such as Star Wars, nearly every minute of the 140-minute film included work by ILM. For the film Jarhead, which is not considered a visual-effects film, ILM created about 40 minutes of effects. With that in mind, consider this: ILM currently renders most visual-effects shots at around 2K x 2K resolution; however, some productions are moving to 4K x 4K resolution. A shot is an arbitrary number of frames; film is projected at a rate of 24 fps and video at 30 fps. To produce the final shots, compositors combine several layers of rendered elements for each frame. A 100-layer shot is not unusual; most shots include at least 20 layers. It took 6,598,928 hours of aggregate render time to produce the shots in Star Wars: Episode III--Revenge of the Sith.